NBC’s “Nightly News” on Tuesday flashed a clip of Barack Obama speaking on the night he was elected president two years ago, with anchor Brian Williams remarking on how much younger Obama looked.
Plenty had changed in two years, and news organizations harnessed firepower on the air and online to record a long, tough political night for the Democratic president. Republicans were making strong inroads in Congress, and it was clear from the coverage who was to blame.
“This is about President Obama tonight,” Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly said. Voters were saying, “Look, we gave you a chance and you’re not cutting it. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to cut it next year or the year after. But right now, you’re not cutting it,” he said.
Williams opened NBC’s prime-time coverage of the election by projecting Republicans will win control of the House of Representatives with 236 seats to the Democrats’ 199. He then reminded Americans where the polls were open to still get out and vote. Within a half hour, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann read a statement from the Democratic congressional campaign committee calling NBC’s estimate “a mistake.”
Within an hour, however, CBS, ABC and CNN had followed suit, without specifying the number of seats.
“This is more than just a message for Barack Obama,” said CBS News’ Bob Schieffer. “This is like a Halloween rerun here. People are just saying, `This is someone who came to office, promised change and the change didn’t happen.'”
News organizations, aware that viewers were also checking smart phone or computer screens along with their televisions on the midterm election night, provided a blizzard of widgets, apps, dashboards, Twitter tie-ins and iPad doohickeys for the night.
Akamai Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, showed rising traffic peaking around 6 p.m EDT. Web traffic…